ExpanDrive

OpenSolaris is both great and horrible. Horrible in the sense that it is nearly impossible to get anything other than a basic LAMP stack to install/compile without 30 minutes of Googling around and 20 minutes of tweaking environment variable, shared libraries, or make files. After endless [weeks] of banging my head against the desk, Jon came about this solution:

$ pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000 sunfreeware
$ pkg refresh

This sets the default pkg authority to the SunFreeware site – full of pre-compiled binaries that are to actually INSTALL and WORK on OpenSolaris/Solaris 10. How novel?

Test it out by installing sudo

$ pkg install -v IPSFWsudo

I’m tagging this post with as many keywords as possible in hopes that people come across this post via Google. I want to love OpenSolaris, but it is such a nightmare to use with open source software. You’d think that out of Sun’s 34,909 employees they could construct a team of 20-30 people whose sole job was to make OpenSolaris usable and competitive with Linux for those trying to host websites.